Billions of devices are being connected to the Internet to form the Internet of Things (IoT), which is far bigger than our current Internet. The IoT includes networks of sensors and things and subsumes machine-to-machine, machine-to-human, and human-to-human sensor systems as well as software things in applications and databases. Things include sensors, which are hardware items we can touch and which can measure certain data values of interest. For example, a sensor can include a temperature sensor or a humidity sensor. A thing can also be a software object in a program or a database, which serves a similar purpose of measuring items of interest, but may not have a physical manifestation. An example of a software thing can be the number of employees in a company database or a performance indicator of a virtual machine in a data center.
In the absence of dynamic and flexible IoT entities, multivendor interoperability and creation of closed-loop (autonomous) IoT systems are laborious and may require manual intervention. It is typical to see isolated sensor (IoT) networks for badge management, access management, building management, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system management, surveillance, supply chain management, and other operations or business applications. These silos often prevent intelligent policies from being applied that cross vendor boundaries. Consequently, automation of business rules and workflows suffers due to limitations of interoperability, scale, and IoT context.